Corrupted Photos - Cause, Cure??
Issue-A half dozen digital photos on my laptop when opened were corrupted to the point of ruin
Facts-Four year old Dell Inspiron 1564
Running Windows 7 Home Premium which includes Microsoft Office Picture Manager
Photo Source-snips or right clicks of internet photos, and one snapshot taken from Xmas Drone. I do not think any of those taken with digital camera have gone bad, but am afraid to check for fear of further damage.
The degradation of the quality varies from one to another. Some have vivid green stripes, others appear to be a jigsaw puzzle fragmentation of the photo.
An attempt to attach three of them to an email to send to an expert for analysis resulted in only one of the three being able to be opened, although all three thumbnails to appear on the sent copy of the email. [PS, have not yet heard back from said expert, hence this post]
Some Possible Causes Hopefully Eliminated-The graphics card has been hopefully eliminated as some photos open normally. [Due to concerns over other files being infected, have not used it much at all since this problem developed.]
Microsoft Security Essentials found no problems in a full scan, so if it is a virus, it was not picked up.
I think all the infected photos were in one specific folder on the desktop awaiting further filing. Is it possible for a single folder to somehow become corrupted? The same folder also contained some video shot from the drone which worked initially but now shows ‘encountered a problem’.
To my knowledge, almost all of the 75,000 or more photos HAVE been backed up previously on external hard drives as well as other laptops. My plan to do a massive, comprehensive backup of ALL of them today was put on hold by the suggestion that I might be replicating the problem and infecting other storage areas.
I think I am too old to get a mac. I know that at some point I will need to find and learn to use an editing program which will replace the picture editing program which is apparently no longer supported.
Any suggestions and comments will be examined and almost always appreciated. Thank you.